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A figurative and free-ranging psychoanalytic novel was not something Bion would have felt free to write and – more to the point – to publish had he and his wife, Francesca, not moved to Los Angeles, which they did in 1968. Once there, Bion set about adjusting to the new culture, establishing links with the analysts who had invited him, and setting up an analytic practice. He also began work on a book, which he called The Dream, published in 1975. Two years later he added The Past Presented, and in 1979 – with the addition of The Dawn of Oblivion – the novel had become a trilogy. In 1991, at the instigation of Francesca Bion, the three were finally published in one volume, with corrections, together with an enlarged version of A Key to A Memoir of the Future, which had first been published in 1981. Francesca Bion has described the Memoir as
a fictionalised, dramatised presentation of a lifetime's experiences, filled with a crowd of character; voicing the many facets of his own personality and thought; at the same time we recognise ourselves among the dramatis personae. [see Volume XV, p. 101]
Bion's Memoir of the Future is a work that makes use of the form of a novel in order to explore the meanings of analytic and philosophical concepts, without his writing being constrained by having to ‘make sense’ in conventional terms. Bion seems to have felt an urgent need to do this: to liberate himself from the constricting container–contained effects of the ‘psychoanalytic establishment’ in order to distribute the elements of his thought in fresh patterns and configurations. These patterns are capable of triggering the reader's own alpha-function (as is true of the more formal writing in Learning from Experience) in ways that may be of use to the clinician.